Hitler's raid to save Mussolini

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Steven E. Aschheim

Brothers and Strangers traces the history of German Jewish attitudes, policies, and stereotypical images toward Eastern European Jews, demonstrating the ways in which the historic rupture between Eastern and Western Jewry developed as a function of modernism and its imperatives. By the 1880s, most German Jews had inherited and used such negative images to symbolize rejection of their own ghetto past and to emphasize the contrast between modern "enlightened" Jewry and its "half-Asian" counterpart. Moreover, stereotypes of the ghetto and the Eastern Jew figured prominently in the growth and disposition of German anti-Semitism. Not everyone shared these negative preconceptions, however, and over the years a competing post-liberal image emerged of the Ostjude as cultural hero. Brothers and Strangers examines the genesis, development, and consequences of these changing forces in their often complex cultural, political, and intellectual contexts.

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Michael Asher

"By the summer of 1941 Erwin Rommel was Hitler's favourite general. Sent to North Africa to halt the British advance into Libya, he not only stopped the British offensive but drove them back to their Egyptian base. He seemed to be unbeatable on the battlefield, so the British planned to kill him. On the eve of the next British offensive, Operation Crusader, a specially trained commando team landed by submarine behind enemy lines. Marching deep into the desert, they attacked Rommel's headquarters. At the same time, in its first ever combat mission, the newly created SAS parachuted sabotage teams close to the German airfields to knock out the enemy air forces on the ground." "Michael Asher reveals how these daring raids were practically impossible from the start - but the volunteer commandos and SAS men had no idea this was effectively a suicide mission. Poor planning and incompetence in high places was matched by fantastic bravery and brilliant improvisation that enabled a handful of the survivors to escape back to British lines and tell their story. From Bob 'Lucky' Laycock, the model for Evelyn Waugh's Lt. Col. Tommy Blackhouse, to the tragic Geoffrey Keyes, awarded a posthumous VC for leading the operation, Michael Asher investigates the true story of Operation Flipper: the plot to kill Rommel."--BOOK JACKET.

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Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, Volker Riess

The title refers to a caption in the scrapbook of Kurt Franz, the commandant of the Treblinka concentration camp. Underneath the heading "Those Were the Days," and reproduced here, are pictures of smiling officers at a site where some 700,000 people were exterminated in the gas chambers. To refute revisionist historians who negate the testimony of Holocaust survivors, and to disprove those Germans who said they were coerced into murdering Jews, the German authors--Klee is a journalist, Dressen a lawyer and Riess a historian--present the damning and harrowing diaries, letters, photo albums and official reports of Germans who willingly participated in the Final Solution. A member of a unit that killed 33,771 Jews in the Ukranian Babi Yar ravine boasts: "It's almost impossible to imagine what nerves of steel it took to carry out that dirty work down there." Of the annihilation of thousands of Jews in White Russia, a commander says, "The action rid me of unneccessary mouths to feed." And wagging its tail for the camera is Franz's dog, which on numerous occasions was set upon Jews to bite off their genitals.

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John L. Plaster

SOG was the most secret elite U.S. military unit to serve in the war in Vietnam, so secret it was "black" - meaning its very existence was carefully concealed, even denied by the government. Innocuously code-named the Studies and Observations Group, SOG contained only volunteers from such elite units as the Army Green Berets, USAF Air Commandos, and Navy SEALs, and answered directly to the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs, with some missions requiring approval from the White House. Inside Vietnam, only General William Westmoreland and a few senior non-SOG officers were briefed on SOG activities. Now the never-before-revealed exploits of this top-secret commando unit are vividly recounted by Major John L. Plaster, a three-tour SOG veteran. SOG took on the most dangerous assignments, going behind enemy lines to penetrate North Vietnamese military facilities in Laos and Cambodia and along the heavily defended Ho Chi Minh Trail, where only air support - and sometimes no support at all - was available.